Funding for Madagascar's battle against a plague of locusts is running out, putting 13 million people at risk of food insecurity, the U.N. agriculture agency said Wednesday. A three-year anti-locust program was launched by the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) alongside the country's government in 2013 in response to a plague that swept the country the previous year. It successfully halted the spread but the risks of relapse are high in the rainy season. "Taking action now is critical to ensure the significant efforts made so far, financially and technically, are built upon rather than lost," Dominique Burgeon, director of FAO's Emergency and Rehabilitation Division, said in a statement. "The current campaign is essential to reinforce the decline of the current plague, avoiding any relapse, and then continue towards a full-fledged locust recession." Failure to carry out in full the joint program would waste the $28.8 million so far mobilized and could trigger a large-scale food-security crisis in the country. A further $10.6 million is needed to complete the campaign, paying for monitoring and spraying operations to the end of the rainy season in May 2015. The FAO cautioned that even a relatively short interruption to monitoring and spraying operations of about two months could significantly erase progress made so far, which includes the surveying of about 30 million hectares and the tackling of locust infestations over more than 1.3 million hectares. "The costs that will result from ceasing locust control activities will be far greater than the amount spent so far, so it is critical for the international community stay the course and complete the Locust Emergency Response Program," said Patrice Takoukam Talla, FAO's representative in Madagascar.
